For many years the climate of Greenland had steadily become colder until farming was becoming impossible. The people were starving, and many had already left for the ancestral lands of Iceland and Norway.Wood was a scarce commodity in Greenland, but a young man known as Stein the Red was salvaging boards and beams from abandoned houses and even his own home to build a ship so that he could leave Greenland. Stein had inherited a time-worn, yellowed parchment that had been handed down from father to son for several generations. The faded words on the paper told of an early exploration into a vast land to the west of Vinland. This land was literally swarming with never-ending herds of bison. Did such a land exist? Others had sailed eastward to lands well known. Stein intended to sail westward to find this fabled land of bison or die trying.